I was hoping that somebody could comment on the accuracy of Stanley Lombardo's reading of Iliad Book One. Should I use it to study the Homeric line, or would it promote bad habits? Are there other/better readings available online? Are there any readings that can be downloaded?

He uses a stress accent, rather than a pitch accent, he also seems to say [face=SPIonic]ou0lomenei/n[/face] rather than [face=SPIonic]ou0lome/nhn[/face], and he probably pauses for too long after "[face=SPIonic]ou0lomenei/n[/face]".

Thanks for the information! I was so excited to find that the files you hyperlinked are downloadable: I don't have access to the internet at home, and this way I can put them on my mp3 player, and read along at my leisure. You can't do that on Lombardo's website. I can't wait to listen to them.

Has anybody here considered posting sound files of themselves reading? It would be very useful if somebody qualified were to do that.

I'm having great fun with these audio files already. A question though about the Danek/Hagel reading: Does the mp3 file actually start at Od. 8.267? It doesn't seem to correspond to my text, but it must be in Book 8 somewhere, right? It sounded very odd at first, but after a few listenings, the music was impressed in my head.

I'm about to listen to the Avery Andrews readings now; although I was able to download them to my computer, I couldn't put them on my mp3 player, which is disappointing and curious. Is his version very different from Danek/Hagel, or is it primarily the difference between singing and reciting?

I'd love to hear comments about the various recordings, or about your personal experience trying to read the Homeric line.

hi swiftnicholas, stefan hagel emailed me the following explanation of this in 2002 (for the realplayer clip):

You're perfectly right, that's not the Odyssee...In the Odyssee, the poet Homer introduces the song of the fictive singer-poet by "but he, playing the phorminx, preluded to sing beautifully, about the love of...". In the following, the indirect speech is shifted to something like full quotation, or replaced by direct narration. I wanted to use the lay of Ares and Aphrodite as a song taken out of its context in the Odyssee, so I have changed the first line to a typical opening, with an invocation of the Muse:

a)/rxeo Mou=sa ge/lwtos o(\s a)qana/toisin e)nw=rto

Begin, Muse, of the laughter that rose among the undying

and for the mp3 clip, a different last word:

a)/rxeo Mou=sa ge/lwtos o(\s a)qana/toisin e)tu/xqh

re my own experience of reciting homer, a long time ago i tried to model the same information which danek/hagel used to recite homer; they used a 4-tone scale corresponding to the old phorminx whereas i used a more common 7-tone scale (common for string instruments anyway)... it's in a .pdf here:

I’d taken your reconstructed Iliad and translated the first 10 lines it into sheet music. One thing that’s clear is that it has a certain musical melody to it; which is a good sign if you reconstructed it through a purely etymological method (without adjusting for pleasantness).

If your pitch were truely inaccurate, it would be unlikely to form a melody by pure chance.

So, it seems that it probably has at the least a recognisable correlation to the original pitch and melody.

Thanks so much Chad! That does clear up the confusion perfectly. I wish he had posted that information on the website beside the audio clips.

And thanks for the link to your site. I'm only just starting to explore Homeric recitation, and I found your scales for the beginning of the Iliad and Sappho extremely helpful. Have you ever considered recording a recitation and posting it?

Is the pitch, as determined, an exact, or general, guide? In other words, is it intended that the singer’s pitch be in the general region of the indicated pitch at all times, or should the singer always be at the marked pitch?

Did you choose to use a 7 note system more or less arbitrarily? (Because if so, and the ancient bards used a different number of notes, we would expect a small proportion of the syllables to be off by a single pitch.)

Great work, by the way. The Iliad without the music might as well be prose with an odd sentence order.

i only put together that model so that i'd have an idea of how greek might have sounded on the basis of the evidence i read... all it does is show how homer sounds if you apply the statistically significant patterns found in extant greek music (found by devine and stephens). i can't say for sure that there aren't glaring errors in it because i've read references about e.g. a papyrus fragment containing a pitch transcription of a menander iambic line, and the "new guide to accenting greek" suggests that the 2nd beat of a long acute is on a higher pitch than the 1st beat. i'm also not sure if non-accented proclitics cause anathesis, devine and stephens equivocated on that so i'd have to read all the greek fragments again... another thing is that there's this opinion that non-strophic music (like homer) followed the pitch accents strictly but strophic music (like choruses of drama and pindar) didn't, i think it's on the basis of dionysus of hal's pitch description of a line of euripides' lyrics where he describes non-accented pitches sung lower than accented pitches and things like that... on first glance to me it looked like the pitch of the strophe in euripides might be following in responsion the pitch of the antistrophe, which would be interesting, but i haven't had a chance to look at things like this more closely

the 7-tone scale came out naturally as i tried to model the things in devine and stephens, given that i found they described 4 different pitch peaks and 3 different types of pitch drop; as i applied this to texts they all seemed to stay consistently within a 7-tone range, only then i read up on the standard 7-tone scale of ancient greek music. it might be coincidence.

i think the singers of homer would have kept strictly to whatever scale they used, which is what aristoxenus says expressly in his book on music theory. there are lots of unknowns though, in addition to the uncertainty of the whole model, e.g. whether it was sung to an enharmonic scale or chromatic or diatonic (or to different scales at different times), my assumption is that they used the enharmonic scale, which would explain why accented syllables in names of people and in words following grave-accented words are on average 2 whole tones higher (i think that's right from memory) than accented syllables in other words.

but because of all these uncertainties there's no point me recording anything; it's just my general guess about how it might have sounded; i only put it together because i'm an auditory learner and i didn't want the terrible stress pronunciation of academics i've heard to get stuck in my head as a beginner. there was nothing out there which described a technique for doing this so i had to make up one; even devine and stephens just present data about pronunciation and leave it to the reader to come up with a technique about how to apply it.

i've seen that stefan hagel has written some sort of software to do what my model does but automatically, he sent me the first few lines of the iliad which have a pitch trace line over the top of each line. it just shows relatively how the syllables probably sat next to each other, which is all my model did as well. i hope this ramble answers what you asked, but if you have any other questions let me know, thanks

but because of all these uncertainties there's no point me recording anything; it's just my general guess about how it might have sounded; i only put it together because i'm an auditory learner and i didn't want the terrible stress pronunciation of academics i've heard to get stuck in my head as a beginner. there was nothing out there which described a technique for doing this so i had to make up one

Unfortunately, I picked up bad habits in pronunciation, because I started studying Greek on my own with the first textbook I found in a used bookstore. But I'm still a novice, and I want to form some good habits before the bad ones are too deeply embedded. I'm finding some of the technical language difficult to understand and apply, but the visual scales you created helped me to form an idea in my head of what I was reading about pitches, even if you think it's not entirely accurate. Listening to the various recitations available online also provided examples of what I'm reading---about the "academic" stress pronunciation, and the attempts to reconstruct the pitches.

I think many other beginners would benefit from the visual presentation of the pitch scales--even if imperfect--and audio examples to accompany them. Some guesses sound so much nicer than others.

Thanks for your helpful remarks and links. It nice to have so many helpful people in one place!

Chad, the reason I asked is that there is a definite musical melody to your reconstructed Iliad (as you would expect there to be). What’s more, the music seems to fit the meaning of the sentences, even changing its feel from one caesura to the next, and when the meaning of the sentence is revealed (for example, in line 3 when the very positive [face=SPIonic]polla\j d' i0fqi/mouj yuxa\j[/face] is reversed in implication by [face=SPIonic]1Ai+di proi5ayen[/face].)

However, a small number of the notes seem to me to be off by a single tone (from a musical standpoint). (For example, the last two notes on line 4 seem to be one tone too low.)

I think any pitch reconstruction technique should be able to be tested in this way. The words of the Iliad must have been chosen for their musical qualities. For one thing, the Greeks wouldn’t have employed a musician to sing out of key. For another, the meter alone would have been insufficient to allow a poet to remember six hours of poetry; the melody itself must have been used as a memory aid.

Are you certain that in line 1 it is [face=SPIonic]qea&[/face], rather than [face=SPIonic]qea\[/face]? (I've seen it written both ways.)

After all, the comma after a vocative noun isn't a real sentence pause. In English placing commas around vocatives seems to be just a writing convention, in Greek it's probably just a Byzantine practice.

That's great to hear Eureka! I've been listening to the readings we've discussed while I follow along in the text, and it has helped me not only to hear the rhythm of the Homeric line, but to better understand some of the literature on the subject. It would be wonderful to have more readings online, whether to compare with other readings, or for new verses. Thanks for doing the hard work

Verses 8.272-275 in the Danek/Hagel recitation are rendered so beautifully; I keep listening to them over and over.

swiftnicholas wrote:Verses 8.272-275 in the Danek/Hagel recitation are rendered so beautifully; I keep listening to them over and over.

I agree. Unfortunately I don't have a phorminx (those 4-stringed lyre thingys), or the ability to use one. So anything I do will only be a guide for those wanting to sing it themselves, not a proper performance.

There're a few odd things about that performance, though. He does seem to sing unnaturally high. So much so that you couldn't imagine him singing at any great volume. As a result of that, he also sings quite fast. That would make it difficult for any bard to remember the next verse fast enough.

It's sounds as if he's trying to match his voice to the pitch of the phorminx. I'd be surprised if there was any written evidence to support that.

Eureka wrote:There're a few odd things about that performance, though. He does seem to sing unnaturally high.

This may be intentional. I have this idea in my brain (it might have come from a book - it might not have, I cannot recall) that Greek and Roman public speaking was pitched higher to cut through ambient noise better. Without amplification, everything that helps you be heard is good.

hi eureka, taking into account all the qualifications i give to the old model above here's how line 1 would go, if qea\ was grave (i.e. following the Perseus rather than OCT reading):

[E]mh=[O maybe]nin [H]a)/eide [C]qea\ [A]Phlhi+a/dew [A])Axilh=oj

the evidence (at least as i read it) shows that graves tack on to the front of a word the way enclitics tack on to the end. so qea\ Phlhia/ would be a steadily rising sequence of syllables, with the last syllable as the highest pitch.

re catathesis and anathesis, you can read Avery Andrews' summary of Devine and Stephens:

also you can see D&S itself. they show that, like other pitch languages today, accented pitches in a clause drop successively, and then anathesis is the word Andrews uses to name the pattern just in ancient greek that, after a grave-accented word, the next accent is higher than normal.

quickly re the other things, West (in the best authority on greek music) said that greek music from all the ancient descriptions was most probably more high-pitched than we'd expect, given the things it was comapred to, and i think it's accepted by all scholars in this area that the pitch of the singing rigidly follows the instrumental in non-strophic music, west talks about this and so do the other books on greek music.

I have to say, the higher pitch works well for lines whose last syllable has an acute (especially line 7). Since the pitch is already high, the climb at the end doesn’t feel unnatural.

Seeing as the pitch is the same as that of the phorminx (or moreover, the kithara), it may be possible to be certain about which key to use. Is it known exactly what the notes on these instruments were?

As for the qualifications, I realise that the system is not known for certain. On the other hand, it’s likely to be heavily related to reality.

It’s good to see (on that site you linked to, Chad) that the Greeks probably had a little pitch freedom. Therefore, while the position of the pitch drops would have dictated by Homer (excluding the inevitable changes to his poems over time), some notes can surely be changed by a semi-tone or so according to the bard. So, there is more than one way to be technically correct.

hi eureka, they'd be as i've done them in the actual document..., i.e. [C] would change to [E], i.e. if you follow OCT and other's edition, with commas around the qea/, then the pitch resets at the start of qea/ and at the start of Phlhia/dew.

re the musical key, i've never been able to find a definitive answer on this, i've looked through west and others; my best guess based on the age of homer and what we know about ancient greek musical history and theory of scales is that it'd be in the enharmonic scale keyed to the Dorian mode. even this doesn't give precision, since there were several "dorian modes". I'm sure it would have been described somewhere random in greek literature, maybe in one of the literary critics or in the Deipnosophists or something it'll be identified...

also nb the 2nd syllable of mh=nin should really be 6. but there's a phenomenon called secondary rise which is statistically significant in extant greek music: if the interval between the last syllable of a word and the next syllable is more than a certain amount (1.5 tones if i remember), then that last syllable of that first word is higher, rather than lower, than the penultimate. it's unclear in my model how many of the 7 pitch levels you need to have as an interval for this to occur, particularly when you take into account different scales having different intervals between the notes. that's why i marked it above as "maybe".

Ah, cheers. I see the mistake I was making. I’ll keep reconstructing lines until I consistently get the same results you did.

That secondary rise must be present in this line, because regardless of whether thea has an acute or a grave, “nin” cannot be at 6. If it were, then the first syllable of “aeide” would sound completely out of place.

(It’s easy to justify things like this retrospectively, of course, but in this case, the line would be almost unpronounceable without the secondary rise.)

hi Eureka, i don't know if it'd help but i just put on that old temp web site an updated pitch document which i did in october last year, where i changed the way i annotated the pitch to make it more logical and to show what was happening.

i also just put the first few lines of the acharnians on, to show you how i personally use the pitch model now: i.e. not to map out the whole music for a text, but just to quickly chart in excel the first few lines of a new poetry style i'm studying, to see how the rhythm and pitch might go together. it's a hideous .pdf since the unicode didn't .pdf but i thought it might be useful to see what (limited) use i make of it now, for this purpose i still use it; i'm not going to fix up the .pdf though because it's just a copy of my working notes.

It looks like the emphatic words, [face=SPIonic]'Atrei+/dhj[/face] and [face=SPIonic]'Axilleu&j[/face], are spoken like lifted by grave words. And then [face=SPIonic]te a!nac a)ndrw~n [/face]are also spoken like lifted by grave words because of their association with [face=SPIonic]'Atrei+/dhj[/face]. Do these emphatic words consist of all proper names, or just the names of heros and gods?

What I can’t figure out is, in the previous line, why [face=SPIonic]e0c ou{[/face] isn’t a tone higher than it is. It looks as if it’s already been through one catathesis. It that the effect of the proclitic?

hi Eureka, you're right about proper names, they (like accents after grave-accented words) are pitched higher than the "standard" pitch peak, i've got a page ref on that old pitch model i think to Devine and Stephens.

you can see then that a)/nac and a)ndrw=n aren't emphasised: each has a pitch peak a note lower than the peak of the last word, that's what catathesis is.

as to what types of names this applies to, i can't remember if devine and stephens specified, e.g. people's names, names of cities &c. if you look in that section of D&S they might say; i doubt there's enough evidence to say though.

re line 6, there's no catathesis. it's anathesis: at that stage i inferred from d&s's statement that proclitics most likely have grave accentuation that they give rise to the "lifted by grave" phenomenon which a andrews calls anathesis.

all the way from the first syll. to the first accent of a lexical word (i.e. prw=ta) you have a steady rise. another uncertainty here is how to treat non-lexical circumflexes in this steady rise.

Thanks for your help, Chad. But I have at least a couple more questions...

If I understand correctly, [face=SPIonic]e0c ou{[/face] is so low because the 2nd note of [face=SPIonic]ou{[/face] must be lower than [face=SPIonic]dh\[/face], which must be lower than [face=SPIonic]ta\[/face], and so on?

If that’s the case, then I take it the aforementioned anathesis is on the word [face=SPIonic]prw~ta[/face]?
In which case, why isn’t [face=SPIonic]ou{[/face] similarly affected by anathesis? Is that some characteristic of those sorts of pronouns?

Sort of off topic... D&S is turning out to be a difficult book to get a hold of. The university’s library doesn’t seem to have it. (It has a very sparse Greek section.)

If I understand correctly, e0c ou{ is so low because the 2nd note of ou{ must be lower than dh\, which must be lower than ta\, and so on?

If that’s the case, then I take it the aforementioned anathesis is on the word prw~ta?

yep

In which case, why isn’t ou{ similarly affected by anathesis? Is that some characteristic of those sorts of pronouns?

anathesis only applies to lexical words: non-lexs are included in the run-up to the first lexical accent.

Have you got the "lifted by grave lexicals" and "lifted by grave non-lexicals" labelled the wrong way around on the new pitch model?

not as far as i can see, the pitch drop after a lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by lexical grave) is smaller than the pitch drop after a non-lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by non-lexical grave). that's the same as on my old pitch model, and i have a page reference there to Devine and Stephens on this

In which case, why isn’t ou{ similarly affected by anathesis? Is that some characteristic of those sorts of pronouns?

anathesis only applies to lexical words: non-lexs are included in the run-up to the first lexical accent.

Have you got the "lifted by grave lexicals" and "lifted by grave non-lexicals" labelled the wrong way around on the new pitch model?

not as far as i can see, the pitch drop after a lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by lexical grave) is smaller than the pitch drop after a non-lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by non-lexical grave). that's the same as on my old pitch model, and i have a page reference there to Devine and Stephens on this

Oh, I get it. It's about whether the the word causing the anathesis is lexical or non-lexical.

In defense of Mr. Lombardo, I'll say that he's the only one who doesn't put me to sleep by the end of line 3.

One of the guys I've heard used to play a part in Star Trek as a Klingon.

One of the pitchers I heard sounded like a robot. It took me a while to figure out that I wasn't listening to the product of an automatic greek reciting program. I would beg him to stop insulting Homer and do his pronunciation exercises (a noble pursuit) with, say, Tucídides.

All of the stressers, including Mr. L, disregard the hexametric rhythm completely. That´s a shame, because that rhythm is the only thing about Homer that we can be sure about (excuse my grammar).

Pitchers do better with rhythm, but when I read along tapping at every arsis, the resulting taps are far from rhythmic. There's a tendency to rush through the dactyls, making their long vowels short.

Pitchers tend to sound emotionally dead. From their intonation, you wouldn't know whether Hector is holding his son or smashing greek skulls.

So, I'll give the golden apple to the pitcher who can keep the rhythm and figures out a way to combine pitch with phrase intonation. I know that you can do it, folks!

To really sing well is not an easy skill, and in fact requires a natural ability. Classicists are not chosen for their ability to sing, so we can't be too pickey. (What's more, I think they are more interested in technique than performance.)

Stressing is much easier, because it's what we do in our native languages. If we pronounce it like our native language, we can easily apply our own language's phrase intonation to it.

However, I think to do that would be a cop-out. Most things that are worth doing require effort, and many of them are too difficult for some.

How to do this phrase intonation is a good question. I suspect that more important words would be slightly louder (just like in modern singing), so:

Eureka, I was commenting on the talkers, not the singers. I wouldn't hold against anyone attempting to sing the Iliad his/her lack of a good singing voice. Wait until you hear me (not pretty).

Before I found this forum I heard a guy singing the Iliad. I didn't write down the url, but you might have heard him also: a guy with a Greek name from an English university that plays an electric lyre. Well, his first line (I.1) stuck in my head, and the other day, looking at chad's pitch (or note ?) wave charts, I could swear that both matched perfectly (if I understood the chart right). Coincidence?

i've never heard it; the only person who has said that they've looked at my old pitch stuff is eureka. since i can't access media files online anymore could somebody please try to find it (that one which bardo talked about) and let us know whether it's good, and also this one?